The present invention generally relates to a vehicular, powered slider drive assembly and, in particular, to a vehicular, powered slider drive interface.
Pickup trucks and other related vehicles have a rear window, or backlite, that is mounted in a vehicle body aperture, immediately behind the seats in the vehicle passenger compartment. Many of the backlites are built with one or two sliding panels that ride in slider tracks, while opening or closing across a portion of a window aperture.
The sliding panels may be moved manually or automatically across the window aperture. When automatically driven, the sliding panels may be moved by, for example, a powered slider drive assembly that includes a cable having a regulator attached to at least one cable end, wherein the regulator may have brackets that are rigidly mounted to mating braces that are attached to the sliding panel's bottom corners (see, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,119,401 to Lin et al.)
Another automatic powered slider drive assembly utilized to slide sliding panels requires a bracket that is attached to the regulator, to rigidly mount the regulator to the bottom of the panel (see, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,324,788 to Koneval et al.) These rigidly mounted brackets and braces comprise at least a portion of the vehicular, powered slider drive interface.
Because of the above-stated rigid mounting, these known interfaces require that the alignment between the panel in the slider tracks and the regulator, the cable, the cable brackets, and/or the panel braces be precise. If this precision is not attained initially, and then maintained after installation, the panel will become “cocked” which causes the sliding panel to bind in the slider tracks.
Thus, those skilled in the art continued to seek a solution to the problem of how to provide a better vehicular, powered slider drive interface and drive assembly.